


A Girl, A Boy, and A Wolf

by Raaj



Category: Bravely Default (Video Game) & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, I can't believe my brain equated Alternis with Ringabel, NOW WITH FIXED TAGS
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-09
Updated: 2018-12-09
Packaged: 2019-09-15 01:34:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16924065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raaj/pseuds/Raaj
Summary: "Imagine Person A of your OTP is a shapeshifter. One day B finds A as a dog (or whatever animal), and believing it to be a stray, takes A home and adopts them. A waits for a chance to escape, while being unintentionally babied by B. Person A sees B in their private life and begins to like them, and when A guiltily runs away B is heartbroken. A finds B as a human and asks them out."Now imagine this happens when they're kids, so uh, no romance.  Just Alternis rescuing Edea from hypothermia when she foolishly goes searching for her runaway dog alone.





	A Girl, A Boy, and A Wolf

The wolf always makes things too simple in its head. He’s fed. He’s petted. The walls of the room protect him from the freezing cold outside, and though his bones still ache after the run in with a golem and his hind ankle in particular hurts to walk on, there’s been very little need to run and strain his body further here. This is the safest he’s been…ever. The wolf wouldn’t mind staying forever.  
  
The boy is angry that the wolf feels this way, because it means when the girl bounces into the room and his ears perk up, it’s not looking for a way to escape. It’s looking for her attention, and gives the softest of whines, just barely audible to her human hearing, until she laughs and pets and hugs him, her small arms enveloping his chest.  
  
He needs to change back to his human form soon, because the wolf is winning. The wolf is happy, and it wants him to be happy, and that just feeds the anger in the boy’s heart because the wolf doesn’t see the truth. The girl thinks he is nothing but a dumb dog, and the adults are indulging her because he’s still weak and wounded. As soon as he regains his strength enough to be considered a threat, he’ll have to leave. It won’t be the first time.  
  
But it hurts. That people are more willing to approach the wounded wolf than the crying child. That this girl likes him for now because she thinks he is her  _pet_ , because the wolf lies still and lets her thread tiny ribbons through its fur. The wolf likes her gentle fingers, even when they are a little clumsy.  
  
When the boy rouses from the lull of being stroked and realizes what she’s done, what he’s allowed, he growls his irritation and shakes the more loosely-tied ribbons out. Others are more secure, though, and the girl swats him on the nose before he can address those. He doesn’t growl at her for that; she never swats hard, to hurt. Only to grab his attention. She’s barely out of babyhood still and gets easily frustrated. She just wants someone to stop and listen, and it often ends up being him. “Snowball, no! Mugugu…you looked so pretty with all of them. I wanted to show Mother at least…”  
  
The mother is a small woman, so small he could easily knock her over in his wolf form. She is sickly and vanishes often, coming back smelling distinctly of a hospital’s disinfectants, a scent abhorrent to the wolf’s sharp nose. And the boy knows well enough not to trust women, so they can both agree to hang back from her warily, only feigning enough friendliness for her to not think he will bite her child. This requires surprisingly little effort on his part; she seems all too calm about the strange, too-large dog in her household being played with by her daughter. The boy does not know what to make of her trust, or the fact that she agreed with her daughter’s insistence that his initial wounds needed to be seen to by the spiritmaster himself. But he knows that when tiny Edea says the braids in his fur are for Mahzer to see, he willingly sits down again.  
  
And he realizes then that he’s truly in trouble, he has to go, because the wolf is winning, but it is never right about people. The wolf always underestimates how quickly their whims can change and how terrible they can be, time and time again.  
  
He waits just a couple of days longer, testing his ankle’s strength by becoming a little more boisterous in his play with Edea–which excites her to no end, and she barely even cries the one time he does bowl her clean over by accident. When he panics, thinking he’s hurt her, and nuzzles her in apology, her tears quickly vanish; she laughs and grabs both sides of his face and smashes her nose against his, making him huff an exaggerated sigh. For a moment, he’d thought she’d be angry, that all her affection would vanish and she’d punish him, but she’s still too innocent for that.  
  
Edea won’t be innocent forever, though. One day the girl will become a woman. And because the mother is home and might catch sight of such accidents, might take more issue with them, the boy refrains from playing with her again. Even when the girl crawls all over him or calls her pet name for him a dozen times over, he forces himself to stay still. But his ears still flick toward her voice.  
  
She’s already tamed the wolf. He really has to go. He slips out early that evening. It doesn’t take much effort; a soldier even holds the last door open for him when she sees him struggling with it. They’ve done it on a few previous occasions, too, but the boy can’t help but think of how they’re probably glad for him to be leaving the little mistress of his own accord.  
  
Two of the three trails leading from the fortress smell of human, so it’s the third one he takes. Lightly staffed because of the meandering route, he remembers hearing the soldiers say, with fewer of the monsters bred by Central Command wandering it. Less chance of being hunted by any creature, or being spotted when he shifts back to his true form.  
  
The last time he was human was in Florem, and he cries out when his paws, already sensitive to the snow, become hairless hands and feet that are even more tender. He forces the transformation through, even if it means being exposed to the blowing wind with only tattered clothes to cover his body, because he needs to be sure he can still change back. The past few weeks he spent smuggling away from Florem and winding up inadvertently in the care of the spoiled but kind girl easily make up the longest period he’s spent as a wolf. He needs a moment to be sure he still can be human… though at the end of that moment he wonders why he still hopes to get anywhere with such a useless, weak body, and touches the asterisk kept on a chain hidden under his ragged shirt, transforming back into a wolf. The dog is better at survival than him. It’s the dog that treads the path till dawn, and shortly after finds a small village where the smell of people is scarce. He pads around the dilapidated buildings, finding so many huts abandoned–which suits him just fine, even if it’s a little eerie. There are similar sights in some parts of Florem’s slums. They only mean fewer humans. There are still two men, but they’re old; little threat, the boy and the wolf figure together. He’s bold enough to let them see him at a distance, wanting to know what their reaction would be. They’re cautious, but not alarmed, and that tells the shape-shifter that he’ll be able to use the village as he pleases so long as he doesn’t give them reason to think he would hunt them. It’s not something the boy has ever done, but it’s something he’s physically capable of, and people have leapt to that conclusion before. Leapt to it, and then decided to hunt him first.  
  
He’d rather stick to hunting the small prey animals around the village, the hares and rodents. The wolf could easily hunt bigger meals like deer, caribou and fox, but for the boy it was not so simple. Deer, in particular, he has trouble hunting. The wolf would go for the straggler, the one the herd is ignoring because it’s sickly and will probably die anyway, because it’s an easier mark. The boy sees the same herd and the same straggler and ends up seething and wanting to tear out the throat of the biggest buck. It’s simpler if they just go after the rodents. The hunting is good here, and they pick clean four carcasses, dragging the last into an empty hut for shelter from the wind as they eat. Perhaps most people would be disgusted to eat as the wolf does, but the boy has spent too many days hungry to be choosy.  
  
Though he already misses a little the cooked meat Edea would slip him. And when he curls up in the corner of one hut with a tattered blanket, he misses the thick rug in her bedroom.  
  
Most of all, he misses her small hand scratching his fur.  
  
He huffs, flicking his tail to cover his legs. He’d known all along that wouldn’t last. Will he miss being called ‘Snowball’? Hardly. The little luxuries like cooked meat and warm rugs, he’ll take for himself one day, he will. And it’s stupid to think of a girl’s affection for her pet as love. It isn’t real. She doesn’t care about  _him_. No one does. He’ll make his own way. He’s already gotten out of Florem, hasn’t he? Eternia has not been the best step up, given its climate and his misadventure with the wildlife, but he still doesn’t regret stowing away on the boat. He got out. And he’s learned. When he gets back to Gathelatio, he’ll choose his next destination with more experience.  
  
Someday, he’ll find a land where he has a chance.  
  
Having traveled all night, he lets himself sleep on and off through the dawn, dreaming snatches of a future manufactured from the glimpses of life he had witnessed within various houses. He’ll have cooked meat, fresh vegetables, fruit–oh, how quickly he’d jumped on the peach Edea had dropped by accident, and the green beans from her plate. She’d shouted at him for snatching the fruit, but the vegetables she had scraped off quite deliberately, preferring to feast on other things. He’ll have a pile of blankets, and nice clothes. Maybe someone kind would have taken him in. The voice he imagines is that of Edea’s mother, and he frowns a little before accepting it. He had not liked how she smelled, but her voice was gentle. If he ends up having to rely on a woman, he would rather she be like Mahzer.  
  
…He misses them. He shouldn’t. He knows they wouldn’t like him if they knew what he really was. The wolf can be a pet, at least for a little while. The dirty, stupid boy can’t be anything. He knows this, he’s already learned his lesson, he won’t be stupid by hoping again. No one is going to take him in. He’s going to have to take what he can for himself, as he always has, stealing and snatching as the wolf.   
  
At dusk, he rolls back to his feet and tries to shake off the dismal reality his dreams have crumbled into, padding out to hunt for more meat. The beginning of twilight has brought out more of the hares, and the boy and the wolf are slinking up behind one when a sound makes all three stiffen, ears swiveling up.  
  
It had been high and thin, barely audible even carried by the wind–but it sounded like–  
  
“ _Snowball!_ ”  
  
The hare bounds away. The boy sinks down to his haunches in disbelief. That was Edea’s voice. Had she dragged out a search party for her runaway pet? He knew they spoiled her a bit to begin with, but surely this is too much. Too much trouble for everyone, as he won’t go back to being her pet.  
  
“ _Sno-o-owball!_ ”  
  
He can hear her better now, enough to tell that she’s been crying. Guilt flickers within him before he stamps it down angrily and whirls on his feet with a huff. No. She and whoever came out with her can call and call all they want, but they won’t even catch a glimpse of him. He isn’t…going…back…  
  
“ _Snowball, where are you?!_ ”  
  
…Why aren’t there any other voices calling for 'Snowball’? Surely she’d cried and raged and thrown a tantrum until she’d bent a few knights to her will? She’s done it before. Why aren’t they calling out?  
  
The shapeshifter falls still, waiting to hear the others. They’re probably bored. They’ve likely given up already and thought 'good riddance’ to him, but sooner or later they’ll make a token effort to indulge Edea. Edea will notice if none of them are trying. She’ll get mad and yell at them.  
  
Yet he doesn’t hear any voice besides Edea’s call out. Nor does he hear Edea yell at anyone. She only calls for him, her voice weakening as the hour passes. She’s gotten closer, he can still hear her, but she’s wavering more. Losing her voice. Someone else will have to call out instead. She’ll croak and pout and flail her tiny fists if they don’t.  
  
She falls silent. The whole village falls silent. A moment passes, then two and three, with no further sound. The boy lasts five minutes, and then the worry building up in the wolf overflows into him as he dashes to where her voice last came from. When he spots her, she’s slumped against one of the town’s many graves, her eyes fluttering shut with exhaustion. She’s too naive to realize just how dangerous sleeping in the cold is, and the boy’s heart hammers. What a stupid girl! She wants the wolf, but the wolf wouldn’t do her any good here! She needs warmth, shelter, things only people can give. If he leads the two men still living in the village to her–no, they’re old and slow, they might take too long. She needs to get inside, now.  
  
He feels the pain in his paws before he realizes that he’s human again. He stumbles over his stiff hands in his haste, still switching mindsets from a wolf’s loping gait to a boy’s run, but after that momentary confusion he’s straight to her side and works on picking her up. She’s smaller than him, but he’s still small, too, and his bare feet are sinking deeper into the snow as he tries to lift her weight. It’s awkward and painful and  _hard_  as his leg starts to protest the extra weight, but finally she stirs a little, enough to realize she’s being picked up, and latches onto him without question. That helps, and he lurches with her into the cabin where he ate and slept. There are two blankets, thin and full of holes but still cover, and he quickly throws one over her on the bed before using the other to dry his stinging feet and try to rub warmth back into them. He doesn’t want frostbite. He saw what it could do in Florem winters, and he knows this weather is much colder. He has to get his feet warm again, now. He wants to be irritated with her for putting them both at risk, and he is, a little, but he’s more worried. As soon as his feet are itching with feeling, he turns back to her and huddles under the blanket at her side. This way they’ll both get warmer. She shouldn’t be too badly off, at least, she has her coat and thick boots on, but she’s even younger than him, and came all the way out to the village on her own. Her mother is frail. What if she’s frail too? What if she falls ill because of him? He can’t let anything happen to her.  
  
She doesn’t love him, he knows that. She just got upset that her pet ran away. But, he… He doesn’t have words for how he feels. Instead he lets himself whine as the wolf would, from deep in his chest, and curls closer around her. For tonight, he decides. He’ll take care of her while she rests. He’ll do it as a boy, so she doesn’t get her silly hopes up again over her wolf pet. Once it’s morning, he can see if those old men are trustworthy enough to leave her with. Or maybe by then there will be a search party out for  _her_. He’s only heard one title in this land, “Grand Marshal”, not royalty. But if the boy didn’t know better, he would think she was a princess and the daughter of a king. She is loved and spoiled for it. People will look for her. There’s a twinge of bitterness with that knowledge, but he feels relief more strongly. She won’t be hurt for her naive mistakes. He wants her to learn from this, not suffer for it.  
  
When the night grows darker and colder, he starts to clear out the dust of the hearth to make a fire. It takes a few tries, his hands shaking more away from the warmth of the bed and blanket, but he knows it’ll be worth it and perseveres until the rags catch flame and the hut’s darkness fills with light and more importantly, heat.  
  
“…Hello?”  
  
If he were a wolf still, his ears would have pricked up. He turns his head to see Edea, awake again, watching him with eyes full of sleep.  
  
“Who are you?”  
  
Her voice is raspy still, but the boy hears his own voice creak when he answers. “I found you outside.” It’s as much of an answer as she needs. “You shouldn’t be so far out.”  
  
“I’m looking for Snowball. My dog. He’s lost.”  
  
“Dogs can take care of themselves,” the boy says sternly, and it’s true in his opinion. The accident aside, he’s been able to fend for himself as a wolf. “He probably ran away. Just forget about him and go home.”  
  
“I’m not going home without him! Mugugu…”  
  
The boy crosses his legs and shifts on the floor in frustration. Now that she’s irritated with him, she’ll probably put up a fuss if he comes back into the bed. But even if it’s warmer with the fire, there’s still that little bit of cold…  
  
And then it vanishes as Edea drops half the blanket on him, sitting down by his side. “You don’t even have boots,” she tells him. “ _I’ve_  got my boots, so you must be colder. Where’s your coat?”  
  
The boy doesn’t have a coat, but he knows that that answer would be odd in a winterbound country like Eternia. So he doesn’t answer.  
  
She huffs, and falls silent for a moment, but it’s not in Edea’s nature to be quiet for long. Not when she’s fixed on something. “If you don’t have a coat, you can’t go outside,” she tells him bossily. “But you found me, so you were outside. Did you see Snowball? He’s a big, big dog, and pretty, with all white fur, and he’s…he’s…” She bites down on her lip, seeming lost for description, and the boy looks at her with a wrinkled brow.  
  
Pretty? He hasn’t heard that one before.  
  
She seems to catch his skepticism, because she frowns at him, but the expression passes. She looks forward to the fire.  
  
And then she looks at him again.  
  
This time she’s  _staring_ , her mouth gaping, and he tenses up. She must be seeing something she doesn’t like, but what is it? He hasn’t done anything wrong, there can’t be anything–  
  
He’s so distracted trying to think that he isn’t prepared when she surges at him, patting both his cheeks and smashing her nose right into his as their foreheads collide. He has to catch himself with his hands so they don’t both fall to the ground. His eyes are stinging, and so are hers, he can see, but she’s starting to smile.  
  
And then she happily croaks “Snowball!”, and the boy freezes. His hands give way, and Edea rests on him after they’ve fallen, as completely at ease as if they were back in her room and he was still just her pet.  
  
“You are Snowball! You have Snowball’s eyes, and your hair’s white like Snowball’s, and, and, wait, did you really run away? Was someone mean to you? I’ll punch them,” she promises without a second thought, because that’s how she is, and the boy is still frozen.  
  
She recognized him.  
  
No one’s recognized the boy and the wolf as the same before.  
  
His eyes are stinging worse, and Edea makes a low sound of worry. This time when she talks, she sounds uncertain. “Why are you sad? I found you,” she says. He found her, really, but it’s hard enough for him to speak when he isn’t crying, his insides twisted up, so he can’t contradict her. “It’ll be okay. Did…did you run away because of me? Was it the ribbons? I won’t put ribbons in your hair anymore. I won’t try to ride you, either! I’ll be really, really nice, just tell me what to do. I don’t want you to be all alone, Snowball. What if you get hurt again?”  
  
He shakes his head and hides under his portion of the blanket, overwhelmed. She doesn’t understand anything, doesn’t understand that he isn’t the wolf; the wolf is him. She loves her pet. She doesn’t love him.  
  
But this feeling, so warm that it hurts…it might be the closest to love that he ever gets.  
  
His arms have been holding the blanket down against her trying to lift it, but once he shifts forms, his own bulk lifts it up. Edea quickly finishes the job, peeling the blanket away to look at the wolf huddled underneath. She frowns a little, maybe because he never answered her, but she doesn’t scold him. Instead she balls up part of the blanket and pats his cheeks, blotting away the tears. “It’ll be okay, Snowball,” she says again. “I’m not mad. Mother won’t be mad either. Nobody’s going to be mad just because you got lost. I’ve done that lots of times.”  
  
That last bit makes him huff involuntarily, because he can imagine she has, and Edea gives a little smile before lying down to rest with him.  
  
It’s… a very warm feeling.  
  


* * *

 

  
When Edea and her wolf–because the boy can’t deny it any longer–walk back to Central Command, there is a man he hasn’t seen before standing at the entrance.  
  
His sheer size is the first hint the wolf has that he might be trouble. The second is Edea’s little hand tightening on his back.  
  
“Inside,” the man says. “And to your room, Edea. I come home and find everyone has been searching for you through the night?”  
  
“Snowball’s coming with me,” she says immediately.  
  
“Snowball…?” The man frowns, and looks down at him imperiously; the wolf has to fight very hard not to tuck its tail in submission. “Actually. Snowball and I need a moment alone.”  
  
“Father!”  
  
Oh. So this is her father.  
  
…As much as she takes after her mother in feature, the boy can’t help but think he sees the resemblance between these two as well.  
  
“To. Your. Room. Edea.”  
  
The man’s voice is very stern, and now the wolf’s tail  _is_  pointing straight down, but Edea turns to him and scratches his chin. “It’s okay, Snowball. People say Father is big and scary, but he’s really just big. So don’t cry. I’ll see you soon.” She lifts her head high in the air, then marches inside as if defying orders, rather than following them. The boy doesn’t miss that one officer is quick to motion her along, as if expecting her to change her mind and try running off again any second.  
  
Edea’s father simply shakes his head, then speaks to the wolf. “Come.” He strides ahead.  
  
There is a moment to wonder if Edea’s father believes he is trained, or simply thinks his voice alone would hold command over a beast; the wolf knows it is the latter. That was not an order that left room for doubt. But where are they going? This hall is… ah. Her father’s office. Edea brought him to play in here once, and she got scolded for it. Thinking about that, the boy nearly misses what that man is now sighing over.  
  
“Of all things… I leave for a month-long mission, and come home to find my daughter has taken an asterisk holder for her pet,” he says, his crystal blue eyes set on the wolf. “Has she been keeping you on your toes, too?”  
  
It takes the boy a second for it to register– _he knows, he knows, he **knows**_ –and then the wolf lies very low to the ground, ears pointed back, wondering if it should show its belly. It’s trapped, it’s trapped, he shouldn’t have come back.  
  
The man frowns at that reaction. He makes a very visible show of taking his hands away from his sides, far from the sword he carries, and sitting on the stiff chair behind the desk. “Rest easy. Yes, I know you are an asterisk holder. I know you understand me. So understand that I want to talk to you.”  
  
Maybe, the boy thinks desperately, if he just acts dumb, the man will doubt himself. He drops eye contact, then lowers his nose to sniff along the floor, as if simply a curious dog. This man can’t actually know about his asterisk. The gems are rare, they have to be–he’s only seen the one in his life.  
  
A moment passes. Edea’s father drums his fingers, utters a very quiet “mrgrgr”, then tries again. “I’ll tell you what I know about you. I know you hold the were asterisk. My wife does not hold an asterisk herself, but she knows much about my search for other holders, and she knows the lore of a number of them. She had an inkling of what you might be all along, but felt sympathy for how our daughter found you.  
  
"I know you are young, an adolescent. Victor does not specialize in treating animals, but he has on occasion. He was able to make a number of observations on you. So I know, also, how my daughter found you, and believe that you never intended to enter my household by deception.” The man pauses, then rephrases himself more simply: “I am not angry with you. I know you left while my daughter was still at her lessons. It is obvious you did not mean for her to come along. Yet, finding she had, you have now brought her back to me. I owe you my thanks.”  
  
His voice is calm and level. As sincere as the boy has ever known, and he plucks up the courage to risk looking at Edea’s father directly again. The man smiles a little at the acknowledgment, and the change in expression makes him seem just a little less scary.  
  
“I look for asterisk holders because I wish to change the future of this world for the better,” he says. “So if you have any willingness to fight for this world–turn back so that we might talk. But if you wish simply to leave, I will not stop you.”  
  
He lays out two options, and both boy and wolf want a third. He had decided on being Edea’s wolf. But that…would never work, he sees now, not when there are people who know he is truly human. Should he quietly leave? He can fight, yes, but he doesn’t have any ambition to fight for the world like the man is talking about. Changing the world, making it better–stuff like that has always sounded like high-minded nonsense to him.  
  
But if he wants to stay with Edea…  
  
He sits back on his haunches and wills the transformation. He isn’t what the man is expecting, he already knows that before the man’s eyes widen–at how small his human form is? at his raggedy hair? his lack of shoes? But he can’t just leave.  
  
“I can fight,” he claims. “I can hunt.” Rodents and hares, mostly, but the man doesn’t need to know that just yet. He could push himself harder, if that’s what it will take.  
  
The man sits back in his chair and groans. “No, no. Who in their right mind gave you the asterisk? You’re even younger than Victor believed–”  
  
“But I can hunt!”  
  
“ _No._ ” The man holds up a hand, looking at him seriously. “I’m certain you can. But I will not ask a child to hunt an enemy for me.”  
  
The boy sucks in a breath, feeling himself sink with despair. He can’t stay, then. He can’t stay–  
  
“I’m sorry. I would not have asked you that, if I had realized how young you are. If you have any living relations, tell me, and I will find a way to deliver you to them.”  
  
Living relations? It’s nearly a foreign term to the boy. He only knew the one, and… “…She didn’t want me.”  
  
Edea’s father closes his eyes for a moment. There’s rage in how his brow creases one moment, and sadness in how his mouth shifts the next, but he’s calm when he speaks again. “Then you may stay here.”  
  
“But what do you want me to do?” If he isn’t to hunt, what’s expected of him?  
  
“I want you to grow up and put some meat on those bones,” the man says, wry and serious at the same time. “What’s your name, boy?”  
  
He hesitates for a long moment. “…Snowball?”  
  
“You do not have to indulge my daughter. In fact, I would you do not on that matter,” the man commands. “She has been lonely from time to time, but she would be just as happy with a human playmate to keep her company. I want your real name. Unless…do you not…?”  
  
The boy shakes his head. He doesn’t know any  _real_  name for himself. No one ever wanted the boy long enough.  
  
“…We have to call you something more dignified than 'Snowball’,” the man mutters, rubbing his face. Then he looks closely at the child, considering. “Would you allow me to suggest a name? And if you think of something you like better later, that’s fine. But we need something to call you for now, at least.”  
  
Oh. The boy draws himself straight up, nodding quickly. A proper name would be nice–and he doubts the man will do worse than 'Snowball’, even if it has grown on him a bit.  
  
“…Alternis. We’ll call you Alternis, for now.”


End file.
